08 July 2015 1:46 PM

It’s a shameful gap in my knowledge and experience. I know nothing of Greece. When I see TV reports from most parts of the world, I know what lies around the corner from the Red Square, Pariser Platz, Tiananmen Square or White House vantage point from which the reporter is speaking. I know this actually and metaphorically. I have some sense of the history, some acquaintance with the political balance and the level of freedom, just as I know what it smells like, how cold it can get in January and how it feels when a little breeze blows down that little street that is just out of shot, where the reporter and his crew will go for a cup of coffee after the piece to camera is over.

But when it comes to Athens, I’m quite blank. I’ve never been there, or to anywhere in Greece, never having come any closer to Greece than Cyprus, which contains a lot of Greeks but is really in the Middle East. Partly as a result, I have a very sketchy idea of Greek politics and history, a sort of kaleidoscope of Costa-Gavras’s film ‘Z’, not seen for at least 45 years, Colonels, an exiled King, and a seemingly endless string of Papandreous. I’m also a little haunted by the Second World War, the miserable scenes in Athens in Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, the even more miserable scenes in Crete in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ , oddly merging in my mind with Mary Renault’s astonishing recreations of Athens in the classical era and the astonishing Elgin Marbles, reminding us in our 21st century pride that others came before us who perhaps knew *more* than we did about the world, and whose skills we have lost.

So I can say nothing remotely authoritative about internal Greek politics, or why Greek voters did as they did, or the influences on Syriza or anything like that.

I can only examine it as an EU matter. It seems strange now but during much of the Cold War there were still several Western European countries which did not precisely follow the model of France or Germany. They were all poor – Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland. They were all socially conservative. Three, or sometimes two of them, depending on the current state of Greece, were also politically conservative and had openly authoritarian governments.

I say ‘openly authoritarian’ because it seems to me that almost continental governments with their Civil Codes, examining magistrates, institutionalised official corruption, national police forces, identity cards, juryless trials, semicircular non-adversarial parliaments and gutless newspapers are authoritarian anyway, but have learned in recent years to look as if they’re not. These are improvements, and I’m glad of them, though they seem to me to be superficial. As a visiting journalist or a well-off traveller, I’m always aware of floating on a shiny surface. The real hard nature of these countries is seen only by those who live and work in them. I used to be absolutely astonished, for instance by the contempt which middle-class French people felt for their police force. Now that our police force has become so much more like theirs, I understand it all too well. The improvements in continental countries have been matched by a dreadful weakening of my own country’s liberties, so this is not in any way a smug assertion of superiority.

It was a bit embarrassing to have such openly authoritarian countries on ‘our’ side, especially General Franco’s Spain, whose survival into the modern age seems increasingly unbelievable. Greece joined NATO in 1952 ( as did Turkey, the country that never quite made it into the EU and now, I suspect, never will) , Portugal in 1949, Spain in 1982 (Though Spain had quietly hosted large US Naval and air bases since the early 1950s under the ‘Pact of Madrid). Ireland, of course didn’t join NATO at all because she was neutral. Greece joined the EU in 1981. Spain and Portugal did so in 1986.

There was an assumption that membership, and the resulting dependence on credit and subsidy, would somehow anchor them in ‘democracy’, or at least in ‘democratism’, the obeisance to the external aspects of government by the people, which is the ideology of the New Europe and indeed of the new globalism, and which is a very different thing from freedom. It seems to me to mean that , if one goes through the required motions, of regular contested elections, one is approved of – provided one does not vote for the wrong people. The key to discovering who the ‘wrong’ people are is the word ‘centre’. A party may be of the ‘left if it is ‘centre-left’, or of the right if it is ‘centre-right’, but not otherwise.

Until now, the left has been more ‘central’ than the right, because old-fashioned pre-1939 sovereigntist nationalism is pretty much banned on the Continent, where it is associated with ‘Fascism', Falangism and authoritarian government, or with collaboration with the German occupation.

In Britain, where it has no such associations (though frequent attempts are made to smear it as if it did) conservative patriotism is only tolerated in a symbolic ‘Last Night of the Proms’ and ‘pint-of-bitter’ way in Britain. If it starts making actual demands for independent action, it is derided and marginalised. The single exception to this rule has been the defeat of the attempt (failed so far, but far from over) to get the United Kingdom to join the Euro. By doggedly treating this question as if it is an economic issue (because hardly anyone understands the political issue it really is) , opponents of the Euro have managed to keep us out until now. When economic crisis strikes this country again, as it must, that protection may prove remarkable weak.

An interesting test of EU ‘democratism’ was the success at the polls of the Austrian Jorg Haider, whose controversial career ended in a car accident in 2008. Let’s be clear why the EU’s treatment of Mr Haider was so disturbing. It’s not because Mr Haider was nice, and the EU nasty. Mr Haider was horrible. I did not like the look of Mr Haider. I have an unshiftable prejudice against populist right-wing leaders in German-speaking countries. I have a lingering suspicion that Germany’s own de-Nazification was not wholly complete, but there’s no doubt that Austria, having somehow attained victim rather than aggressor status in the post-war settlement, has done significantly less to confront its tricky past.

But the EU’s boycott of Austria when Mr Haider joined a coalition with Vienna’s more mainstream ( ‘centre right’?) conservative party, and entered government was also very worrying, a multinational power denying voters the freedom to choose their government.

Yes, they did this. See, for example http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/01/austria.ianblack . What was it really about? There was no doubt Mr Haider’s rise was ‘democratic’. The voters had, embarrassingly, voted for him, much as they now vote for the French National Front. Many bad things are, always have been and always will be democratic, and popular.

But the EU still boycotted this freely-elected and constitutional government on its territory, so making clear that its principles were not in fact ‘democratic’ but something else altogether (‘centrist’?). The easiest word is ‘liberal’, though of course it’s also not very liberal to boycott a foreign country because you disapprove of its people’s choice of government. Mr Haider’s offence, I think, was to reject by implication the EU’s ideas of open borders and multiculturalism. You do not have to accept Mr Haider’s rather gamey version of Austrian nationalism to be concerned about those.

Which brings me back to those fringe EU states, rescued from blatant authoritarianism by the EU, and defended against a relapse by the EU. For their poorer citizens ’Democracy’ was completely associated with a new prosperity, rising standards of living, infrastructure, greater freedom to travel and work abroad.

Huge amounts of money began to flow into the former fringe states, in transfers and easy loans. I’d love to know how much, and how much of it, in the end, came from Britain. When I was in Andalusia last autumn, I was amazed to see the pristine white concrete of the new high-speed railway lines, the vast subsidised olive groves stretching from horizon to horizon and the new motorways, far beyond the apparent means of Spain itself to pay for such things.

As these societies were transformed, I didn’t initially connect it with the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. Only later did it seem to be a sort of imperial process, by which these fringe provinces, the loyalty of their elites bought with rivers of EU gold, were helped to become markets for the manufactured goods of the North, and producers of raw materials and agricultural products, and also suppliers of cheap labour, either in situ or as migrants within the EU.

It wasn’t just avuncular generosity. It was a way of buying power, of turning poor, dictatorial or theocratic but independent countries into affluent but subservient provinces, whose economies and cultures were reordered to suit the rich north of the EU. In all of these countries, religious social conservatism has been routed by waves of apparently easy money. The old hard question, ‘Who whom?’ once again discovers the reality . A loan, like a gift, can also be a chain and a fetter, even if it is made of gold or silver. Bonds aren’t called bonds for nothing.

Old-fashioned conservative nationalists couldn’t fight this on the continent because of the Fascist and collaborationist past. Even in France I have a feeling that the National Front is unable (for that reason) to break into the second rounds of the Presidential and Parliamentary elections, and so elbow aside the French Tories, currently known as the ‘Republicans’

The enjoyable paradox now is that a far stronger threat to the EU’s centralised democratism now comes from the Left, especially from Syriza in Greece and their Spanish equivalent Podemos.

So many paradoxes follow. It is the Utopian Marxist left, not the conservative patriotic right, that has actually come into full-scale national conflict with the imperial power of the EU, even though the EU is, at heart, a leftist utopian project. The trouble is that, while these movements quite rightly resent the imposition of mad Procrustean economic policies on them, weirdly punitive and deterrent given the liberal relativism that lies at the heart of the EU, they are fighting against their own globalist anti-national ideals.

In fact the purest exposition of modern Greek nationalism is left-wing. The hardline nationalist right is by contrast a sideshow. You might claim this has always been so because of its Byronic, radical origins. But it hasn’t. The last Greek government to say ‘Oxi’ (no!) to an arrogant continental neighbour was that of General Ioannis Metaxas, a monarchist tyrant, who refused Italian demands for occupation rights to parts of Greek territory.

The EU’s response to this rebellion has so far been imperial far more than it has been leftist. France has been more willing to see the problem from Greece’s point of view. But Germany, and its many desperately sycophantic self-abasing clients in the ‘new’ formerly Soviet-dominated EU states, whose leaders would have been ready for their people to eat thistles if it was the price of getting into the Euro, continues to support a policy of exemplary punishment for rebels. I think all this gives us a clue as to what the EU really is, deep, deep down.

As I write, I have no idea how or where it may end, but I am reminded of Dominic Cummings’s warning about Britain’s government.

‘Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.’

There is no door in Brussels or Berlin either. These people are human, they lack sleep, they don’t understand economics, they let petty ambition or dogma blind them to obvious facts. They may not even have been very bright in the first place.

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31 May 2015 1:08 AM

What is the point of the police if wrongdoers aren’t afraid of them? Yet Durham Constabulary has actually produced a poster chiding parents for using the police as bogeymen.

It pleads: ‘Parents, please don’t tell your children that we will take them off to jail if they are bad. We want them to run to us if they are scared, not be scared of us.’

Is that really what the police are for? If anyone runs to them for aid, it is because they imagine they are fearless defenders of right against wrong, who can be trusted even if they are frightening, and who will scare away bad people. But is that what they now are?

The poster features a picture of a gently smiling officer in a short-sleeved shirt. It leaves out his bottom half, so you cannot see if he is carrying the standard non-confrontational police armoury of clubs, handcuffs, pepper spray and electric-shock dispenser, which he may need to deal with the increasingly violent society which liberal ideas have created.

I am not surprised this comes from Durham, whose Chief Constable, Mike Barton, advocates giving free heroin to criminal drug abusers, and once told me he was ‘proud to be a social worker’.

Now, as it happens, I would never tell a child or teenager to stop doing something in case the police come and arrest him. I know perfectly well that, if I were ever stupid enough to confront an underage wrongdoer, related to me or not, the police would arrest me, not him. I’ve heard or read of quite enough cases where this has happened, especially to people who have tried to defend themselves or their property against feral children.

But millions of people – usually those who have had no recent dealings with this surly and peevish nationalised industry – do retain a simple faith in the police, inherited from another age. They would rather their children were scared of getting into trouble than that they did stupid things. They know that the young all think they are immortal.

Most teenagers can’t – for instance – believe that they could become irreversibly mentally ill after using cannabis. And they come under huge peer pressure to take such drugs at their schools, where cannabis is often sold nearby or on the premises. How useful it would be for their mothers and fathers if they could credibly warn that they risk being caught, given a criminal record and banned for life from travelling to the USA.

But, as the Durham poster makes horribly clear, there is no such risk. The modern police are weird paramilitary social workers, jingling with weapons and armoured with astonishing powers, but not interested in enforcing the laws that matter to us most.

Perhaps one day the few remaining police stations will become heroin dispensaries, serving the people they failed to deter from drug-taking when they were younger.

And so bad people are not afraid of the police, though good people are increasingly afraid of being run in by them for saying the wrong thing.

It’s a pity. Fear is good and useful, when it’s deployed on the side of common sense. But these days what we mainly fear is chaos, and a callous, incompetent state that views us as a nuisance.

How interesting that the new head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, Camilla Cavendish, is an openly declared supporter of the legalisation of drugs. Such a view, publicly expressed on the record, would once have disqualified anyone from this job.

Ms Cavendish was an Oxford contemporary of David Cameron, and even went to the same college. He once signed a Commons report calling for weaker drug policies. Does she say openly what he thinks privately?

A royal luvvies affair

Until recently you could reliably assume that the acting profession and the media were stuffed with fashionable republicans, snobbishly looking down on monarchy. Yet a series of films and plays about our present Queen and her stuttering father seem to have softened the thespians’ radicalism. The latest surprise is the sight of Kate Winslet (who insists her origins are working-class) in A Little Chaos, helping Alan Rickman to soften the image of that tricky old despot, Louis XIV of France. If tough old Lefty Helen Mirren can warm towards the Crown, after impersonating Her Majesty, who’s next? Since reigning and acting have so much in common, it’s surprising all actors aren’t fervent royalists.

George Osborne’s non-existent economic miracle continues. Not only are house prices now galloping upwards in a mad and ruinous frenzy. The official growth figures (about whose first draft the media fell silent in the days before the Election) now confirm that economic growth has slowed violently, dropping to a miserable 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year. The main cause is a combination of falling exports and rising imports, invariable symptoms of deep trouble.

Fight IS – and get something even worse

Even though we no longer have an Army worth the name, since David Cameron slashed the defence budget to pay for the scandal known as ‘Foreign Aid’, voices are being raised to suggest that we intervene again in Iraq.

This is clueless in the extreme. If we send soldiers there, RAF Brize Norton will soon be welcoming planes loaded with flag-wrapped coffins – and in the end we will leave, beaten, yet again. The rise of Islamic State is the direct result of two disastrous foreign policy mistakes, both so obviously doomed that even I could see it at the time.

The 2003 overthrow of Saddam and the 2011 Western-backed undermining of the Assad government in Syria were both based on the idea that if you get rid of a tyrant, something better will automatically follow.

This isn’t true. In fact both these adventures released forces we barely understand and cannot control. There is no sign that anyone in London or Washington has learned anything as a result.

Our pious horror at the intolerant and repressive behaviour of Islamic State is bitterly funny, given that it is really not that different from the policies of our close ally, Saudi Arabia.

You may remember that flags flew at half-mast in London recently to mark the death of the Saudi king, and that British Royalty and politicians are frequent honoured guests in the Saudi capital. I am not against our having good relations with Riyadh. It is a sound principle of wise foreign policy to deal with whatever government is firmly in control of the territory.

We recognise many horrible governments all over the world, and have learned to live happily with grisly Sinn Fein right next door. In which case we may soon have to consider dealing with Islamic State too. Don’t rule it out. It may be better than the alternative.

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08 May 2015 2:17 PM

Let me start by saying without equivocation that I was wrong. I am genuinely grateful to the many persons on Twitter who were quick to point this out to me this morning. I believed, in my heart, that the Tory Party could never again win a Westminster majority. They have done so. You couldn’t be much wronger than that.

I never for a moment imagined that Big Money and Big Lies could so successfully scare, cajole and diddle the electorate of this country. I grew up in a Britain both better-educated and more honest than the one we have today. Perhaps that is why I could not see this possibility. I have not seen, in my lifetime, a campaign so dishonest, so crude, so based in fear and so redolent of third-world and banana republic political tactics.

Actually, I think Mr Cameron is even more surprised than I am. I do not think he ever thought that he would achieve such a result. I’m not even certain he wanted it, as the Liberal Democrats were a very useful alibi for not doing all kinds of conservative things he himself secretly didn’t want to do, and for doing all kinds of left-liberal things he secretly did want to do.

How and why did this happen?

Most of you will know the witty and rather profound film ‘Groundhog Day’, in which an obnoxious TV presenter is forced to live the same day over and over again, until he understands that he himself is required to change for the better. When he does (and the moment of realisation, involving a joyous quotation from Chekhov, is surprisingly moving), the calendar at last begins to move again.

This morning I felt as if I were stuck in such a film, and that I had woken up once more to the same unappealing day, indeed to the same unappealing decade, but also that there was nothing I could ever do to release myself from it. No doubt I have done many things in this life for which I thoroughly deserve to be punished but millions of other people are trapped with me in a political calendar which never, ever turns.

The problem with Britain’s political Groundhog day is this. Every five years or so, the conservative patriotic people of Britain are somehow dragooned into a ceremony in which they vote for a party which pretends to sympathise with them.

It then turns out that it doesn’t actually do so, that in fact it believes in a series of left-wing and radical policies which are the near-exact opposite of what those voters want.

Five years of growing disenchantment pass, featuring new concessions to the EU, more political correctness, more education gimmicks designed to avoid the reintroduction of academic selection, a continuing failure to cope with or even acknowledge the levels of disorder and dishonesty, and a quiet debauching of the currency.

Somehow, at the next election, those voters are persuaded, frightened or otherwise bamboozled into voting once again for the Tory Groundhog.

And the next morning they awake and find themselves in the same five-year-long gap between promise and reality.

The crudest and cheapest methods seem sufficient to rob them of any memory that they have been fooled before. The crudest and cheapest of these is the supposed danger of rule by a Labour Party all of whose policies were long ago adopted in detail by the Tory Party. The difference between the two is that Labour is at least open about its passion for foreign rule, equality and diversity, confiscatory taxation, unsound public finances, mass immigration, terrible schools and lax criminal justice.

Labour , by the way, has to promise its own fake programme of social transformation to its own deluded electorate, who harbour the same lingering illusion that their party possesses actual principles, and will pursue them in office. Indeed, I imagine that for Labour supporters a matching Groundhog Day is constantly unreeling. That is a matter for them.

The truth is that both major parties are now just commercial organisations, who raise money wherever they can get it to buy their way into office through unscrupulous election campaigns. They then presumably reward their donors once they are in office. The electorate are a constitutional necessity for this process, but otherwise their fears, hopes and desires are largely irrelevant. They are to be fooled and distracted with scares (‘The other lot will privatise the NHS!’ ‘The other lot will nationalise your children’s toys and then wreck the economy!’ ) or with loss-leader cut-rate offers, like supermarkets (‘Vote for us and get a cheap mortgage!!’ ‘Vote for us and have your rent frozen!’) . Even if these wild pledges are implemented, the customer will pay for them through higher taxes elsewhere, just as with supermarket loss-leaders.

By playing our part in this ludicrous pantomime, we license it to continue forever. I have thought for years that the key to ending it was simple and obvious. We could revenge ourselves on these fakes by refusing to vote for them. The arrival of new parties, UKIP on one side, the Greens on the other, made such a revolt and redemption even easier.

But I must now admit that the people of this country actually seem to prefer to live the same experience over and over again, and seem astonishingly ready to believe the crudest propaganda. I seethe with frustrated amazement at the Tory claim to have fixed the economy, so blazingly untrue that in commercial advertising it would get them into serious trouble with the authorities.

Ailing GDP figures just before the election were barely mentioned in the media, but easily-obtained statistics on productivity, trade, manufacturing and construction, are all bad and the Tories have missed their own target (whether wise or not)on deficit reduction. In any case, the Tory record on the economy is dreadful.

The idea that they are economically competent in general simply doesn’t stand up to examination. Leave aside Winston Churchill’s disastrous decision to force us back on the Gold Standard , have we all forgotten the ERM catastrophe, in which a Tory government threw £27 Billion into the sea for nothing, because their best brains had mistakenly lashed sterling to the EU’s exchange rate ? What about the irresponsible Reggie Maudling boom of the early 1960s (Maudling left a note for his Labour successor , Jim Callaghan, saying ‘Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock’ which was almost certainly what Liam Byrne had in mind when he left his famous note saying ‘Sorry there’s no money’. What of Harold Macmillan’s decision to spend wildly in 1958 which caused his entire Treasury team to resign in protest , the irresponsible Tony Barber boom of the early 1970s, and of course the devastation of manufacturing industry in the early years of the Thatcher government? Now we have a dangerous housing bubble, official money-printing and the organised theft from savers by the abolition of interest on deposits. I’m not actually saying Labour are much better, or any better, but to vote Tory because you think the economy is safe in their hands is actually daft.

As for the Scottish scare, this is if anything even more shocking. Mr Cameron’s macho mishandling of the referendum, refusing an option for Devo Max, came close to bringing about a pro-secession vote. So did his generally cack-handed management of the campaign. Then, his partisan and petty pursuit of ‘English votes for English laws’ (plus his discourteous gloating about the Queen allegedly ‘purring’ at the result) infuriated Scottish voters who had until then taken the ‘vow’ of maximum concessions seriously. It probably precipitated the landslide to the SNP (one of the few occasions when this expression ‘landslide’has been justified). I have written here about Michael Portillo’s interesting admission that he no longer clung to traditional Unionism. I think we have every reason to suspect that many others in the Tory Party would privately be quite happy to say goodbye to Scotland.

A Tory Party really concerned about the loss of Scotland would have done as Norman Tebbit suggested, and urged its supporters to vote Labour to stop the SNP. Instead, to the dismay of elder statesmen and experts such as Michael Forsyth, it talked up the SNP, paying elaborate compliments to Nicola Sturgeon after the leaders’ debate (George Osborne and Michael Gove were observed doing this) . To claim, while behaving in this fashion, that the Tory Party is a bulwark against the SNP and Labour is in their clutches is absurd. The SNP are delighted by the Tory victory, which makes it all but certain that they will get a repeat landslide in next year’s Scottish general election, with a manifesto commitment to a second referendum, which I think they will then win. Let us see how Mr Cameron now copes with the SNP’s sweeping victory, for which he must take so much of the blame.

At least the Sun newspaper was brazenly open about its ludicrous inconsistency, campaigning for a Tory (and supposedly Unionist) victory south of the border, and for the unquestionably separatist SNP north of it.

As for the famous EU referendum, who really thinks that the propaganda forces which got Mr Cameron his unexpected majority won’t also be activated to achieve a huge vote to stay in the EU? And then the issue will be closed forever.

What is the point of saying all this now, when it’s all over? Because it is true, and because to speak the truth is valuable in itself, at all times.

22 March 2015 12:49 AM

This country is now in the grip of a permanent inquisition into the past. It can never really end, or find out the truth, because there is no objective test of it. Many of those being investigated are dead. The only effect of it is to discredit and undermine what is left of our institutions, from Parliament to the police.

Do people have any idea how much our civilisation depends on trust, or of what will happen when it is gone?

But it is even worse than that. As we boast of our supposed respect for Magna Carta and national liberty, we are trampling on them.

I suspect that many in politics and the media, like me, are worried by this. But they fear to say anything because they can feel the hot breath of the mob on their necks.

The moment you say that Geoffrey Dickens was a buffoon with a poor grasp of facts, that his ‘dossier’ on child abuse might not have amounted to very much, and was lost for that reason, some basement-dweller hunched in the sickly glow of his computer screen will start muttering ‘What’s he got to hide?’ and ‘Perhaps he was one of them’.

From such accusations there is no escape, especially in an age when bemedalled field marshals in their 90s can have their homes searched by officious gendarmes. The word ‘police’ can really no longer be applied to this bureaucratic, continental-style militia of paramilitary social workers, jangling with weapons, loaded with powers they aren’t fit to wield, and almost wholly bereft of common sense.

The quiet collapse of English liberty, and the shortage of people willing to defend it against the braying demands of ‘security’, has left us all powerless against the state. If Lord Bramall is not safe from this sort of treatment, nobody is.

I must stress here that I have no opinions at all on the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of such crimes. I am morally and legally bound to presume that they are innocent, unless and until their guilt is proved.

That presumption, far more than a near-useless vote or a ‘Human Rights’ Act, is the single most important defence we have against tyranny. Once it has gone, in practice, the state may at any time invade your home, seize your possessions, lock you up for ever and melt the key, simply because it does not like you. And it can invent reasons to do so, which a gullible media will unquestioningly accept.

Any judge of spirit, faced with the behaviour of police and prosecutors in modern Britain, really ought to throw out all such cases because it is impossible for those accused to have a fair trial.

Everyone will have seen on TV the processions of grim-jawed gendarmes in white forensic suits carting away computers, houses surrounded with cars and vans with flashing lights, the hovering helicopters, the self-righteous officers enjoying their fame as they trawl for ‘victims’ and promising such persons – as they have no right to do – that ‘You will be believed. We will support you’.

It is no part of a policeman’s job to believe either the accused or the accusers. Imagine how you would feel if the police told alleged burglars awaiting trial, and denying their guilt, that ‘you will be believed’. It is their job, and that of the courts, to assemble a case and seek to prove it before an impartial jury.

Over many years, those protections have been salami-sliced away. The innocent have never been at more risk of ruin. But at the same time, the police and the courts have almost completely failed to deter or control actual crime, much of which now goes unrecorded, unprosecuted and unpunished.

Our system is so upside-down and back-to-front that you can now be cautioned for rape, or be let out on bail after being convicted of crimes as grievous as manslaughter; yet in the late evening of your years, full of honour, having risked your life for your country and having done great service to the state, you can be publicly smeared by some jack-in-office.

The place where our demolished liberty once stood has been cleared of all traces, and rolled flat. In such conditions, we merely await the construction of the new totalitarian state in which our children will have to live.

Ready for action - on HMS Kwik Fit

Now that the Royal Navy’s bluejackets have been re-outfitted to look like garage mechanics, left, has the time come to rethink the whole thing? ‘Royal Navy’ sounds a bit archaic in the modern world. Perhaps we could rename it ‘Navignia’. And ships? They’re pretty old-fashioned too, aren’t they? Do we really need ships? If we can have aircraft carriers with no planes, surely a navy without ships makes sense as well. Kwik Fit could run it.

If the Budget was so good, why am I crying?

Reading the conventional coverage of the Budget on my London train on Thursday, I noticed I was crying actual tears of boredom, which poured involuntarily from my eyes and splashed audibly on to the newspaper.

How could people praise or take seriously this vote-grubbing twaddle of tax cuts, which will be snatched away before they fully take effect, and promises of spending cuts that cannot possibly be fulfilled? How can they do anything but laugh at the cheap bribes on offer, or the blatant political manoeuvres?

I’ll tell you what the Budget really means for most of us – a continued rush towards a low-wage, low-productivity economy of insecure, part-time jobs made tolerable only by cheap credit. And a crucial part of that will be the continued mass immigration that the Government pretends to oppose but, in fact, hopes for, as it keeps pay low.

And this, of course, will continue to worsen our appalling housing, health and transport crises. Our country was not designed for the population it now has, and these problems cannot be solved. We will simply have to accept that everything will, from now on, be worse for all except the super-rich. The biggest casualties of this are those, such as the old skilled working class and the professional middle class, who used to hope for a good life and modest comforts in return for long training and study.

Soon, there’ll be nothing much between the bloated banker’s bonus at one end and the zero-hours contract at the other. We’re becoming the world’s first third-world economy in a cold climate.

After all that fuss about schoolgirls rushing off to be jihadi brides, we are now to have exit checks, like any bog-standard despotism. And do you know what? It will be innocent grannies on their way to Spain who will be held up. Jihadi brides will still somehow slip through. Wait and see.

The redesigned pound coin is obviously small change. How about a New Pound, worth ten of the old ones, and divided for convenience into 20 shillings and 240 pennies?

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01 March 2015 12:13 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Please permit me not to care about ‘Jihadi John’, whose participation in a series of gruesome videos has made him a useful frontman for his murderous accomplices.

They love to provoke us into more futile flailing and squawking about the need to fight back. Most of this fightback consists of adjectives, the only weapons this country now possesses in any quantity. Watch out for them, rolling by like a verbal Red Square parade: ‘Horrific!’, ‘cowardly!’, ‘extremist!’.

Islamic State’s strength depends greatly on its ability to mesmerise Western media.

And the idea of a Londoner presenting the group’s macabre videos might have been designed by a public relations man who understands exactly what makes the British mass media salivate.

Even so, there’s very little we can do about it. Terror is all about nasty surprises, and MI5, for all its poker-faced grandeur, cannot predict the future. Nor will it help anyone to ban Islamist blowhards from speaking at university meetings. It will just make us look silly.

If you’re worried about an Islamist threat to Britain, Jihadi John isn’t the problem. That’s to be found in the astonishing figure of 300,000 net migrants into Britain last year. A fair number of them will be Muslims, reinforcing what is rapidly becoming a highly influential minority in this country.

As we saw in an interesting poll, these Muslim fellow citizens don’t want to chop our heads off or murder us. They are reasonable, peaceful people who make better neighbours than many indigenous Britons.

But they think differently from us about the world. And they believe in something, which most of us do not. That’s the chief difference between us. And bit by bit, as they become more numerous and find their way into our institutions, helped by their competence, self-possession and sobriety, they will change society into one that suits them.

I don’t see how this process can be stopped now. I sympathise with a lot of their concerns, though I greatly dislike their attitude towards women. Like them, I find our way of life tawdry, immoral and often debauched. I just wish we had found our own British, Christian solution to these problems.

But we turned our back on patriotism and the church long ago. And round about the same time, we opened our borders, so wide that I do not think we will ever be able to close them again.

This thing has happened. We are going to have to try to learn to live with it as best and as kindly as we can, for the alternative is horrible. But I for one will never forgive those who allowed this to happen to what was one of the world’s great civilisations.

Bear warning is just hot air

Liberal leftists love to laugh at Mormons, but the Climate Change Cult, to which leftists all belong, makes Mormonism look mild and undogmatic. In a way it’s lucky that the Warmists (perhaps we should call them the Warmons?) have the BBC to do their missionary work for them, or we’d never get them off our doorsteps.

You can almost see the Warmists’ brains glaze over as they start to make their incantations about carbon dioxide. And, like the Book of Mormon, the Warmist Bible is full of the most obvious twaddle, a yawning trap for the credulous.

Most blatant of all their falsehoods is the cult of the poor little polar bear, martyred symbol of man’s carbonic greed, stranded sadly on a melting ice floe as it contemplates a watery grave.

In fact these rather savage and uncuddly predators are doing extremely well just now, with numbers at record highs thanks partly to the plentiful supply of nice fat seals in Arctic seas (yes, they eat those sweet little seals). As Susan Crockford in a new report on the bears says: ‘On almost every measure, things are looking good for polar bears. Scientists are finding that they are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice. Health indicators are good and they are benefiting from abundant prey. It really is time for the doom and gloom about polar bears to stop.’

And I also ought to point out one other thing. Polar bears can swim.

Dr Osborne's dodgy prescription

If you had stratospheric blood pressure, were grossly obese, lived a sedentary lifestyle and smoked constantly, what would you think of a doctor who told you to carry on as you were? That’s what I think of George Osborne, and of his admirers.

What can one do about those who are fooled by the Chancellor’s phoney boom, with its empty fake jobs, its miserable productivity, its galaxy-sized national debt, its swollen deficit and its dangerous housing bubble?

Perhaps I could quietly mention the external debt on our current account. This is the measure of Britain’s ability to pay its way in the world. And in the third quarter of last year it hit six per cent, a peacetime record, but not in a good way.

This is partly caused by an appalling trade deficit of £34.8 billion, plus a collapse in earnings on foreign investments, which were in surplus in 2011, and are now heavily in the red.

Have you, too, been forced by your bank to have a contactless credit or debit card which you can use without a PIN? Are you frequently urged by shop assistants to ‘pay by contactless’?

My advice is to object. The contactless system is an invitation to spend more, faster. It is, by its nature, insecure and means a lost or stolen card can be quickly used to make plenty of unverified purchases, while you are still trying to cancel it. And the £20 limit on contactless purchases will start to go up in September. How long before it is much, much higher?

Some companies will relent, and give you a non-contactless card. Others are obdurate. They should be challenged.

There was much trumpeting of a drop in teenage pregnancies last week, hilariously attributed to sex education programmes that frantically avoid mentioning abstinence or marriage, and assume promiscuity is normal.

If this ‘education’ is so effective, it’s odd that sexually transmitted diseases continue to be rampant, and Britain’s teen pregnancy rate remains among the highest in Europe.

Here’s another explanation – the ‘morning after pill’ now available over the counter to anyone who looks 16, and which makes sure that a one-night stand doesn’t lead to pregnancy. This charming treatment, by the way, was originally developed by vets, to stop pedigree poodles conceiving after a street-corner dalliance with the local mongrel.

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31 January 2015 11:58 PM

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

Last week, the BBC rightly but cruelly replayed David Cameron’s ludicrous words from September 2011, when he went to Tripoli to say: ‘Your city was an inspiration to the world as you overthrew a dictator and chose freedom.’

Now it’s an inspiration to nobody. He can’t go there to say so, because it’s too dangerous. Why isn’t he in more trouble over his active destruction of an entire country? It’s all very strange.

The Gaddafi regime fell because Mr Cameron lent the RAF to various gangs of Libyan jihadis (about whom we knew nothing).

But less than a year before, in October 2010, Henry Bellingham, a Tory Minister, was referring to Gaddafi as ‘Brother Leader’ at a summit in Tripoli.

About the same time, another Minister, Alistair Burt, told the Libyan-British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’.

What changed? Could it be the same forces which decreed that flags in Britain should fly at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia?

The Saudis always hated Libya’s dictator because he had overthrown a dynasty very like their own.

Do we still have an independent foreign policy, or is it governed by another, richer country?

The latest, Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, left, is a clever and cunning mystery story which I’ll say as little about as possible in case it spoils the ending.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to a Tokyo robotics expert, we are far, far away from developing anything remotely like a human consciousness, let alone a human ability to move limbs and experience pain, pleasure or grief.

The real wonder in our midst is the astonishing complexity, beauty and mystery of the human body, and the insoluble puzzle of where and what consciousness is.

We fantasise about creating human-like robots because it helps us close our minds to some of the strongest evidence for the existence of God – an idea we dislike.

My local police force, Thames Valley, has recently admitted (thanks to a Freedom of Information request) that 54 of its officers, some of them specials, have criminal convictions, including for burglary, arson, drug possession, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and computer misuse.

I expect other forces have similar numbers. Are the police really so short of recruits that they cannot find people without such pasts?

Forgiving and forgetting is all very well, but these are the people who come into the homes of burglary victims, and whom we trust absolutely with highly personal details.

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23 December 2014 3:32 PM

I am (unusually) grateful to 'Sid' for directing me to this very interesting document produced by the Oakland Institute, a think tank of which I know virtually nothing, save that it describes itself, dispiritingly, as 'Progressive'.

He did so after a North American neo-conservative called David Frum started jeering at me on Twitter for pointing out that Ukraine possessed enviable natural resources including grain and coal, which might impel the EU to wish to absorb it. He said that the EU is a net exporter of grain (so what? Saudi Arabia exports oil, and doesn't object to finding more so that it can export more) and that next I would be claiming that the EU needed Ukrainian oats for its heavy cavalry. He also said that coal was about as old fashioned as sailing ships.

When I pointed out that China is still an enormous user and producer of coal, he started joking about a Chinese invasion of Ukraine, at which point I Tweeted: 'David, you are not so clever that you can afford to pretend to be stupid' . Since which I have heard less from him.

But it is odd that people seem to think that the old basics of life, death and war, the needs of peoples for food, of governments for money, the need of economies for raw materials, labour and markets, never change. Nor, in landmasses without natural barriers, does the desire to use territory as a security barrier against invasion ever diminish. Nor do powers cease to wish for access to the sea, nor do they ever forget history. All these elements seem to me to be needed for a dispassionate and rational understanding (which is all I seek) of the Ukraine crisis.

To think otherwise is to imagine that the end of World War Two and the foundation of the UN put an end to traditional national rivalry, and old fashioned political economy, much as antibiotics put an end (or appeared to put an end, as we now see) to traditional medicine.

After all, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser and no mean mind in the world of international diplomacy, wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

He seemed to think the resources were an important part of it.

Anyway,I do find this document interesting and would welcome informed comment on it. I don't and can't endorse it (Not only do I know nothing of the publisher. I lack the facilities to check its claims in full) but simply urging its importance as another angle on the topic. I was especially struck by this fascinating passage, which possibly undermines claims that the people of Ukraine stand to benefit hugely from EU associaton. I agree that the word 'may' is prominent, but I simply have not seen this subject even mentioned:

'Amid the current turmoil, the World Bank and the IMF are now pushing for more reforms to improve the business climate and increase private investment. In March 2014, the acting Prime Minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, welcomed strict and painful structural reforms as part of the $17 billion IMF loan package, dismissing the need to negotiate any terms. The IMF austerity reforms will affect monetary and exchange rate policies, the financial sector, fiscal policies, the energy sector, governance, and the business climate. The loan is also a precondition for the release of further financial support from the EU and the US. If fully adopted, the reforms may lead to significant price increases of essential consumer goods, a 47 to 66% increase in personal income tax rates, and a 50% increase in gas bills.

It is feared that these measures will have a devastating social impact, resulting in a collapse of the standard of living and dramatic increases in poverty.'

Is this correct? Can anyone confirm? I am also unsure about its description of the comparative offers of loans and aid from the EU and Russia . I have previously stated this thus : 'Just before the Kiev putsch Ukraine had asked for €20 billion (US$27 billion) in loans and aid. The EU was willing to offer €610 million in loans, one 16th of what Kiev wanted. Russia offered $15 billion in loans plus cheaper gas prices, far closer to what Kiev was asking for. ' I have taken these figures from media reports at the time.

You will see that the Oakland Institute's version is signifcantly different, with the EU offer set much higher. If anyone can explain this discrepancy to me, I would be grateful.

07 December 2014 12:17 AM

Sharks bite, cowpats stink and politicians lie. I’m used to all these things. They’re facts of life. But I can’t stand it when people pretend otherwise.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, should this week have been laughed out of the House of Commons and then out of the Treasury.

Yet his ridiculous claims of success, and his comically incredible predictions based on unfeasible spending cuts, were actually taken seriously.

What’s more, many people preferred to concentrate on his blatant electoral bribes than to examine his shocking record.

Think of him as the captain of a rusty and listing ship, whose pumps can barely stay ahead of the water that constantly seeps between its thin and damaged plates, whose engine is close to breakdown, whose fuel gauges are nudging zero.

Yet despite all this, he proposes to you that you accompany him on a voyage to the Antarctic in midwinter. And when you mutter that this is perhaps not wise, he orders an issue of rum from the ship’s emergency reserve.

Do you then praise him for his astuteness? Shocking numbers of people did so this week. The voyage has begun – and we can’t get off the ship.

The trouble is, you have to look carefully to see this. Mr Osborne is missing his borrowing targets, and is less than halfway to getting rid of the deficit, despite having planned in 2010 to have done so by now.

The easiest spending cuts have already been made. Thanks to low tax receipts, he has postponed his vaunted balancing of the books by two years. Nobody believes he can actually do so. The low receipts are caused by the fact many of the ‘jobs’ he claims to have created are so poorly paid. Millions can’t afford to live on their low wages, and are borrowing to bridge the gap. Real wages will be lower in 2019 than they were in 2007. No wonder household debt as a percentage of income is forecast to rise soon from 146 per cent to 180 per cent.

Our boasted ‘growth’ is mostly caused by mass immigration, which has expanded our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But GDP per head isn’t going up. Nobody believes Osborne or anyone else can make the cuts promised for the next four years. Rob Wood, chief UK economist at Berenberg Bank, described the projected cuts as ‘implausible’, while Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the prophesied reduction was ‘huge by any standards and bigger than the cuts so far delivered’.

Meanwhile, many people still don’t understand the difference between ‘deficit’ and ‘debt’. Nor does the Prime Minister, who once mixed them up in a scripted broadcast.

The deficit is the annual gap between what the government spends and what it raises, made up by borrowing. The interest on this, which could shoot up at any moment if world interest rates rise, currently costs us roughly as much each year as the defence budget. Our budget deficit is 5.2 per cent of our GDP. It is 4.4 per cent in France, which British Tories often deride as a Leftist basket-case. It is 0.2 per cent in Germany. The US deficit, once comparable to ours, has dropped to 2.8 per cent of GDP.

The national debt is what we have piled up by decades of spending more than we make. It is approaching £1.5 trillion (£1,500,000,000,000). We cannot possibly pay it off.

This is an incredibly serious mess. It will not be solved by another mini housing boom or by the building of a few roads. Those responsible now plan to present themselves to the country next May as the people who repaired our economy. In any sphere outside politics, this would be criminal fraud.

*****

Privately schooled Education Secretary Nicky Morgan says she’s not sure it’s right to separate children at 11 by academic selection. When will such people grasp that children already are separated at 11 – by money?

*****

At last, TV gets properly scary

I love ghost stories, most of all the unmatched ones written by M. R. James. I also love Yorkshire landscapes and am particularly fond of Scarborough, one of the most beautiful bits of coastline in the world.

So I’ve been watching the BBC’s three-parter Remember Me with particular interest. Apart from the needless swearing (you can hardly insist on ‘realism’ in a ghost story), it’s by far the best such thing on TV for years. It has borrowed many things from James – the lonely beach in winter, the shapeless flapping thing in the distance, getting closer, the fear that you have wakened something horrible that will now never leave you alone.

I just hope they don’t spoil it with a stupid ending, the hardest part of any ghost story.

*******

Free with every book... a case of pneumonia

My local Waterstones bookshop was so cold on Tuesday I expected polar bears to come in and browse for books on global warming. The reason? A central edict that the doors must be hooked open to encourage customers to come in. Alas, a freezing north-east wind came in as well, and I went somewhere more sensible.

******

I see that the Blair creature is saying his grasp of the world is now ‘much more sophisticated and deep’ than when he was in government. That wouldn’t be hard. By the way, where is the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War?

******

Sexism, or a load of hot air from EDF?

How long is it since British schools dared to tell girls they couldn’t study science? Yet all this week, the French-owned energy giant EDF has been plastering unpopular newspapers with advertisements featuring huge pictures of a woman called Niki Rousseau. She appears above the words (in block capitals): My old school taught me that girls don’t do science.

Really? I’m still looking for fellow pupils of Ms Rousseau at that school, Leiston High in Suffolk, in the early 1980s. But EDF eventually admitted to me that Ms Rousseau herself studied Biology at GCE O-level. This is surely very odd if they ‘taught’ her that ‘girls don’t do science’.

EDF blustered that the claim (which has Ms Rousseau’s stern face above it and her name beneath it) isn’t actually in quote marks. So what? What other conclusion could any normal person draw from this display, than that these were her words?

In the end they fell back on saying (over and over again): ‘It’s how she felt.’ Well, she may well have felt this. I might feel that I am a poached egg and start demanding toast to sit on. But if I am not one, my feelings don’t alter the facts.

One of the nastiest habits of modern Leftism is that it constantly pretends that things are worse than they are, and then uses this exaggeration to demand yet more positive discrimination. I think this is wicked, myself, and plan to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority.

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01 December 2014 1:02 PM

There’s a healthy amount of doubt surfacing now about George Osborne’s ever-ludicrous claims to have sorted out this country’s profound dogma-driven economic crisis. I’m glad to see it. But I have to say that it has been far too long in coming.

I seem to remember encountering audience incredulity during a Question Time in June 2010, soon after the election, when I pointed out that there weren’t, in fact, any cuts, but that spending and borrowing were rising.

It’s not really my subject, so I haven’t perhaps written about it as much as I should have had, but here are a few quotations, the first recent, the others from long ago, to show that even a layman such as I could see that trouble was merley being postponed.

26th May

Does anyone, outside the political commentariat, and outside the Republic of London, actually believe the stuff about Mr Osborne's economic recovery, which is composed entirely of press releases?

Mr Osborne borrows more every day. His new army of the 'self-employed' would be better described as 'self-unemployed'. To examine the growth figures is to intrude into private grief, and every serious economist is horrified by the housing bubble and its attendant dangers. Our main visible exports continue to be scrap metal and air, with which we pay for our Snickers bars, Pinot Grigio and iphones.

6th February

I gaze open-mouthed at the praise some of my fellow-scribblers give to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (what is his name? I can never remember it), as the United Kingdom’s unpayably vast national debt climbs rapidly towards the Moon, and increases by about £2,000,000,000 a week. At this rate it won’t be long before it reaches 90% of Gross Domestic Product (it’s now around 75%). It has been higher, mainly as a result of the two enormous wars we fought in the middle of the 20th century, but we had been getting it back under control until the Blair-Brown splurge, in which we still wallow and flounder, because nobody has any idea how to climb out of it. But what about the lives of the people, employment, income and standards of living.

26th January

Our hopelessly indebted economy, whose main exports are thin air and rubbish for recycling, is repeatedly proclaimed to be healthy as we tremble on the edge of a crash worse than 1931.

21st March 2013

It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness. Why do they do it?

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a government which never had any ideas in the first place.

6th December 2012

Also I really cannot see how spending cuts by themselves are a coherent policy in modern Britain. You have to reduce the demand for spending first, and that is a social and cultural matter, which may cost quiet a lot of money. The entire economy (as economists such as David Blanchflower seem to me to imply) is now so dependent on public spending for survival that large spending cuts, though undoubtedly desirable in principle, will simply kill the patient. He is too ill for any such treatment. You might as well bleed someone who’s suffering from blood loss.

The levels of spending in this country are the consequence of 50 years of leftist social policy. The family, the church, independent charity and self-reliance have been undermined to the point that they barely exist as forces, while the state, and its quasi-independent agencies, have grown enormously. Manufacturing industry as an employer has shrivelled. The unproductive public sector wobbles on top of the productive economy. Our ability to export has likewise atrophied.

How on earth an immediate radical spending cut will do good under such circumstances, I honestly don’t know. The government’s tax receipts would plunge, as large numbers of public employees stopped paying income tax because they were unemployed. And its liabilities would increase, as they had to be paid various doles and allowances instead. Result: More borrowing, plus less economic activity, as you would have taken so much purchasing power out of the economy. Aldi and Lidl might benefit. I don’t think anyone else would. We did, sort of, go through this before in the Thatcher-Howe era. But the enormous receipts from North Sea Oil (now over) served as great national cushion.

18th July 2012 (in a review of ‘Going South’ by Larry Elliott and Dan Atknson)

‘An alarming era is beginning, of power shortages, of unaffordable imports, of higher prices and stationary wages, of a vast welfare system which simply cannot function any more because inflation has wiped out the value of the money used to pay for it. I cannot see how the reckoning can be put off much longer.’

23rd October 2010

What cuts? My favourite two facts about British public spending are these. Housing benefit, probably the single most fraud­ulent and wasteful state handout ever invented, costs more each year than the Army and the Royal Navy combined.

And while Labour spent £600 billion (roughly £10,000 for every human being in this country) in their last year in office, the supposedly vicious cutter George Osborne plans to spend £692.7 billion (£11,500 per head) in 2014-15, after his alleged chainsaw massacre. Britain remains bankrupt in most important ways.

We spend more than we earn. We pay huge numbers of people to do silly jobs, or to do nothing at all while pretending to be ill. Our public services, about which we are all supposed to be so sentimental, are often dreadful. And where this is so, it is usually not because of a shortage of money.